


How the movie ends

by AngGriffen



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-06
Updated: 2008-06-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 15:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngGriffen/pseuds/AngGriffen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kinsler is just awed all the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the movie ends

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to fordandfitzroy and littlestclouds for cheerleading/encouragement.

There is something fucking wrong in Kinsler’s _brain_. For God’s sake, he’s _married_ , and he _meant_ those vows when he said them, and he _still_ means them. He _loves_ Tess, for all he’s sometimes a massive fuck-up.

He’s just--

It’s just that Hamilton is like--

It’s like Hamilton stepped out of a movie, really, or maybe that Kinsler’s currently in one, being played by someone who looks kind of like him, but pulls it off a lot better, and he’ll end up maybe tenth in the credits of this bizarre, twenty-first century version of _The Natural_ in which Hamilton is the leading man.

Kinsler is just _awed_ all the time.

That part’s pretty natural. A lot of people feel that way -- except, perhaps, the Cincinnati Reds, and Kinsler’s opinion of that entire team is something he’s going to keep to himself if at all possible, because he’d like to not end up in too much trouble with the media. The movie that is The Josh Hamilton Story is just overwhelming sometimes, once somebody realizes they’re in it, that they’re watching it being filmed _right this very second_.

So being a little bit amazed by Hamilton isn’t the problem -- it’s just the rest of it. The part where Kinsler’s taking the awe just a little bit too far.

It’s not even really a sex thing. Well, it kind of is, Kinsler supposes. That’s a part of it, but that’s something he’s always been able to ignore. It’s not like he thinks it’s, like, _wrong_ or whatever -- or, well, it’s a _sin_ , sure, but there are a multitude of equivalent sins that nobody seems to care about because they’re the forgivable ones. But it’s a good way to get your ass kicked, and it’s always kind of made Kinsler uncomfortable, and there have always been girls. Women. 

But Hamilton is, like -- he has these tattoos. Tons of them. Curling and twining and spiking up his arms and down his back and around his calves. There’s all this ink, this decoration just _there_ , drawing Kinsler’s eye, and the thing is, of course, that Hamilton hates them. It’s this mark on him, clear as the media fervor about his fall from grace, clear as the ailments that still linger from what he’d done to his body for years. The ink isn’t just ink with Hamilton, like it is with hundreds of other ballplayers Kinsler’s met with tats. No, to Hamilton each spike, each face, each stretch of art on his skin is another neon sign screaming “I am a crack addict.”

And that’s the elephant in the room. Because if it was anybody else, it wouldn’t be a big deal, none of this would be a big deal. The way he feels would be awkward and uncomfortable, but Kinsler would eventually get over it, like he’s always done, the other party none the wiser. But this is -- it makes him feel kind of dirty, and not in a hot way, but in a fucked-up, broken-brain kind of way.

Hamilton says the addiction ties back to the people he associated with back in the day, and that’s certainly part of it, but there’s also this thing that anyone can see, in the excessive ink, in the religious fervor, that it’s not just the people he knew, but something in Hamilton himself, some part of him that’s the embodiment of the slippery slope, the embodiment of all the “one toke of marijuana and next week you’ll be getting AIDS sharing needles to shoot up heroin” lectures Kinsler sat through in DARE as a kid.

Hamilton _needs_ the straight-and-narrow. One second away from it, and everything, the entire movie, comes crashing to a halt, and instead of _The Natural_ it’s suddenly _Requiem for a Dream_.

So even though Kinsler’s never really felt bad about them, the thoughts he has sometimes -- from the perspective of his eternal soul or whatever -- he knows that _Hamilton would_. Hell, he knows that _Hamilton needs to_.

Not as though Kinsler was intending to make a move -- he _is_ a married man after all, and even if he sometimes slips up, he doesn’t slip up _that badly_ \-- but reality will seep into fantasy sometimes, and the idea of maybe getting his tongue on the patch of green on Hamilton’s forearm will be suddenly interrupted by one of two horrors:

The first is Hamilton finding out that sometimes Kinsler feels like this. The religious fervor is for real with Hamilton. It’s not for money. It’s not for show. It’s not for his wife. It is _legit_. Hamilton loves Jesus more than anything else in the world: more than his wife, more than he loved crack, more than baseball, more than _anything_. And it would -- Hamilton loves the Jesus that befriended prostitutes and tax-collectors, the Jesus that befriended Hamilton when all he wanted was another hit, but… It could go one of two ways. Hamilton could shut him out, cut him out as a sinner he just can’t associate with -- sometimes the Bible study guys get like that, and Kinsler’s always been on the outside looking in on that, always been Reform and never going to be anything else. But if Hamilton did it… it would hurt. Because it’s _not_ just a sex thing. It’s hardly _even_ a sex thing. Kinsler wants to be Hamilton’s friend about a million times more than he wants to fuck him, and he doesn’t want to lose the former because of the latter.

But the other is that -- maybe, at the end of the movie, it’s Kinsler’s fault. Maybe he’s in the movie to fuck it up for everyone. To tempt Hamilton away from it all: the teetotaling and Jesus and all of it. Maybe Hamilton gets himself all fucked up again because Kinsler wants to make out with Hamilton a little, wants to get his hands all over Hamilton’s skin sometimes, and that -- even if it weren’t about the gay thing, it’d be about the adultery thing, and that’d be the chip in Hamilton’s religious armor. Maybe that’s the first inch down the miles of slippery slope.

Maybe he drags Hamilton down with him.

Kinsler’s never bought into tragic gays or evil Jews -- archetypes too unfair and characterizations too misconstrued to not be noted and discarded immediately -- but he knows how that story’s going to go.

And this would be so much easier if it were anyone other than Hamilton. Kinsler’s dealt with this shit before and gotten over it when it didn’t feel like it was all so larger than life.

But on the other hand, all things considered, how could it be anyone _but_ Hamilton and his storybook comeback? 

How could Kinsler feel any other way?


End file.
